The Witcher 2 - Skill Trees, Alchemy, Australian Censorship

May 7th, 2011, 00:24

Well one of the typical counter arguments to that is that the depiction of violence doesn't trigger the same response as the depiction of sex does- you're not supposed to want to kill someone just because you're watching people getting killed in an action movie, but you might get horny from seeing Sharon Stone roll that sexy ass. So to influence the highly suggestible(kids) towards sex you'd need much less in the way of explicitness/quantity/graphic realism than you would to turn them to violence.

Originally Posted by JDR13
You're greatly exaggerating, and still missing the point anyways.

Have you seen Hung? Or Californication? Full frontals all over the place. Same with several other shows. I don't mean like every week, but quite often. I guess what is "a lot" depends on the person though.

I agree violence is more graphic in shows with violence, like Game of Thrones. I'm not saying the US does not have some issue with nudity and sex, we do, but at the same time we also have sex and nudity all over the place. We're oddly quite up-tight about it, yet obsessed with it. It's a weird dichotomy.

Originally Posted by JDR13
Americans might be obsessed with sex, but the networks here are pretty uptight about it.

Pretty much what I said, yeah… I agree. It's constantly talked about and brought up and shown in some way, but at the same time we're too scared to actually show it or really talk bluntly about it. It's very odd. I would blame it on religion but the UK has a shares most of our religious history.

In any case I do agree violence is very graphic and more consistent overall. Sometimes this is a good thing though, I can't believe they censored Star Trek in the UK for head-buts for example.

Originally Posted by DeepO
Also, if I understand it correctly, Geralt is able to cast basic versions of each sign right from the start and thatīs good, the first game imo didnīt go well about this - by the time player was able to learn all the signs, he has most likely invested into the first two available (aard, igni) and since these were also the most useful ones, there was little incentive to invest into others.

I think for me, I didn't invest completely in the first two signs in the Witcher, precisely because I knew there would be more signs to choose from and didn't want to overly commit to a build too soon. I like the fact that builiding a character in this way invites replayability to test out and perhaps max out one or two different signs. I also prefer to take a direct roleplaying approach rather than focusing too much on practicality - you can find uses for all of the signs if you really try. Hopefully the sequel will similarly reward experimentation.

Ahh, I'm rather excited for this game. Fingers crossed it gives DA 2 a swift Geralt-styled kick to the RPG gonads.

However, it's a little frustrating to read about the intended censorship in our country again. The system is both antiquated and philosophically patronising at times.
The Risen situation was a good example. Hopefully I won't have to import just to receive an untainted and original boxed version!

After reading a bit more about skills i think i don't like the forced first forced 12 skills

Only 6 talents have to be spent in the Training tree before the other three trees are unlocked. All of the talents in Training (except perhaps the out-of-combat Vigor regen) are useful, and two last ones can be mutated (you can collect a fair amount of mutagens, even of epic quality, fairly early on).